Monthly Archives: September 2014

Last week’s Sexy Pagan Friday offering is as good a place as ever to start off a little rambling about what has probably been my most significant magical practice since returning to KCMO.

Most of my effort, magical and otherwise, has been devoted toward settling in: to establishing my space, and to being in the right place at the right time. Notice all the green in that photo: my hat, my scarf, my pocket handkerchief, the shirt you really can’t see because I got super dramatic with the lighting, and even my fucking socks are green. Zip back through my last few spf posts, and you’ll find a shit ton of green in them, too.

Saturdays I dress in black. The purple tie is usually for Mondays, but I was just feeling extra fabulous last week.

Taking a cue from Aradia, who did this diligently before she quit her office job back in June, I’ve been incorporating planetary colors into my clothing as much as possible. (Wednesday is a fucking challenge: I look absurd in orange, which basically leaves me shit out of luck.) It’s a simple, mindful thing, rather than an act of overt magic, but it’s something. (Mondays are my favorite because purple.)

This also goes back to something I’ve touched on before: crafting a new image for myself as I become too old–and too committed to “professional” life–to let my freak flag fly full time. Since then I’ve learned that I receive very different from both the mallgoers who patronize my jewelry store and the coworkers who’ve known me for six fucking years now when I wear a tie and nice shoes. Simply put, they take me more seriously. (This, of course, should come as a surprise to no one.)

And, I will say, it sure helps that men’s fashion has gone in some pretty awesome directions since I made this decision. Vests are seriously back in style. Colors and patterns are vibrant and fun. And pocket squares!

It’s difficult to gauge the efficacy of general prosperity magic–yeah, I’m doing pretty alright, but I’m also busting my ass–but judging by the ways in which I do seem, increasingly, to be in the right place at the right time, I believe that I can call the experiment, at worst, a moderate success. The things I want to buy are on sale and in my size, I sit down at the right table to meet close friends of the hosts of open events, people respond to my messages on OKC, the art store has a shipment of the strange craft supplies I’m after in the deep discount corner of the basement.

I want to escalate this shit. I bet I can make a talisman out of a tie or a pocket square. Can you enchant a suit? I’ll fucking find out! (And you can’t tell me no one has never tried. The question is, did they blog about it?)

Solid character. Not a role model.

But it kinda fucks with my head. I mean, yes, these are magical successes, in a sense, and I am having a good time with it. But it’s all so fucking butch. I no longer fit my own image of a witch, or even a wizard or a sorcerer. I mean, there’s some precedent for a magician playing the straight man… but being a magician did some fucked up shit to my head: Aradia was preparing to stage an intervention.

The realistic solution is probably to get better at code switching: taking off the work costumes as soon as I get home and putting on clothes that are more in line with my self-image; finding times and places where those clothes are more appropriate.

Last night I finally unpacked my second Dionysus statue–the one that went with me to Indiana and back–and dedicated the altar he now shares with Eros and Aphrodite. This is not their final home, but the vanity I wish to appropriate for this purpose is still full of heirlooms.

No, your eyes do not deceive you: that is a penis-shaped bottle opener front and center. I got it in Athens.

Re-establishing my magical practice now that I’ve moved back to Kansas City has proven a greater challenge than I had anticipated. I’m managing to keep up my Esbats, but only barely. I have failed to resume making regular offerings to my familiar spirits, and the gods… well, since Aradia also had a Dionysus statue, the idol I’d kept in Indiana was only unpacked tonight. I have still not completed the masks the Witchmother instructed me to make, nor have I made any progress on the ceremonial witchcraft book I had once delusionally believed I would complete over winter break.

Part of the problem, I think, is the degree to which my magical practice has come to differ from Aradia’s. While she has found some use from the Orphic and Picatrix hymns to the planets, the Stele of Jeu is not at all to her taste. Meanwhile, I have (very much to my detriment, mind) fallen out of practicing the sort of visionary work that remains central to her practice, and she has picked up a bit of the Hoodoo that’s going around Kansas City circles these days (a Catholic upbringing and a better grounding in Chaos magic paradigm-shifting make that much easier a leap for her than it is to me). And the people we used to do Sabbats with are … not really practicing with us any more; we seem to be drifting apart.

Further, especially since we’re not practicing together like we used to, I feel really awkward practicing magic in a house where someone is not participating.

Of course, since we’re not doing magic the place isn’t really tuned to magic, and there’s more … resistance when we do do things.

This is all just whining, of course. The solution is clear and simple.

Resume the visionary work, keep at the planets, keep at the moons, and fucking DO MAGIC.